But such phenomenal luck was too good to last. He went out one night to join in a sortie, and the morning came without him, and found his mother and Tatia in woeful depths, certain he was dead. Jim went off at once for news, and found him at last in the hospital, with a bullet in the thigh and a bayonet wound in the shoulder. "It is nothing, it is nothing," said the hurrying surgeon. At which Greski made a grimace at Jim, and said: "All the same, if it was only himself now! And the way he hacked that bullet out! We are getting callous to other folk's sufferings." "Why, you hardly felt it," said the surgeon. "You said so." "When one's helpless under another man's knife one says what he wants. It hurt like the deuce." "When can I take him home?" asked Jim, in stumbling French. "After two days, if he behaves and goes on well." So Jim went home and comforted madame and Tatia; and two days later they were happier in their minds than they had been since the siege began, in that they had him there all the time and safe from further harm. He grizzled somewhat at being shelved "just when the fun was going to begin," for he felt assured in his own mind that "he," outside, was preparing for a general assault, and he would have liked to see it. And so the boys did their best to keep him posted in all that went on. They were wakened at daybreak one morning by an uproar altogether out of the common--one vast, unbroken, terrific roll of thunder, so deep, so ominous, so far beyond anything they had ever heard in their lives before that it sounded as though the whole of heaven's artillery had been mounted on the hill-sides, and brought to bear on the devoted town, and was bent on battering it to pieces. Greski called them from his room, and they went in. "Hurry, hurry, or you'll miss it all! We knew it must be soon, but could not learn the day. They will come in on top of this, I think. Keep under cover, and come back and tell me all about it. Oh, ---- this leg!" It was a bad morning for any conscious possessor of a chest--heavy with mist and thick with drizzling rain; a black funereal day, sobbing gustily, and drenching the earth with showers of bitter tears. The chill discomfort of it told even on Jim. "Jack, old man, I wish you'd go back," he said, before they had gone a hundred yards. "I'll bring you word as soon as I can. They're not likely to come in at once, and you'll have plenty of time to see all that's going on. They'll probably hang away at the forts for the whole day. Do go back." "Get on!--get on!" coughed Jack. "I want to see." And they pushed on through the gloomy twilight. The streets were alive with all the others who wanted to see, and long compact lines of gray-coats were pressing stolidly towards the front, to strengthen the lines against the expected onslaught.